Even If The Gods Deny Us
“You were right,” Cody sighed as he sank down onto the large, comfortable bed that had been provided in his temporary rooms, “Those fruit pastries were absolutely delicious.” He opened his eyes were they had drifted shut and smiled both delightedly and coyly when Ted entered his room after him and closed the door. The celebrations had only just begun to wind down and the sun wasn’t far from rising over the horizon, so Cody had been concerned that they might be seen by someone when they headed back to his room but aside from Evan (Randy had already been in their room apparently from what Cody could tell) but Cody trusted that the former slave would know to keep his mouth shut.
Cody didn’t like to consider himself as especially vindictive, but if a wagging tongue ruined his time with Ted then he wouldn’t hesitate to exact a swift and horrible revenge upon the perpetrator.
“You did look as though you were enjoying yourself,” Ted mused as he approached, sitting on the end of the bed near Cody’s head where Cody was laid out.
Playfully narrowing his eyes Cody inquired, “Are you calling me fat?”
Ted snorted, “You could never be fat.”
For a brief moment Cody looked uneasy, “Yeah, well, tell that to Dustin.” Zeus only knew he loved his father and brother to death, but following in their footsteps genetically was something Cody was determined not to do… and yet he knew the amount of food he had packed away that night (albeit in the name of celebration) was probably going to come back to haunt him later.
Ted looked confused, “Your brother isn’t that large.”
“Neither was my father, if you’d believe it,” his mother had insisted that when he was a young man, although he’d always been stocky, his father hadn’t been even remotely close the rotundness he had when Ted had seen him.
Shaking his head Ted chided, “Stop worrying,” and then reached out and swiped his thumb over Cody’s plump bottom lip. His eyes hooded somewhat with mounting excitement as Cody’s lips automatically opened to his touch, his tongue flicking out as though to chase the thumb and draw it back to his mouth. And oh, wouldn’t Ted love to experience that mouth and have it paying its utmost attention to him the way it had the dessert earlier? Holding Cody’s eyes he reached up and flicked his tongue over the pad of his thumb that had been into contact with Cody’s lips and murmured, “I can still taste sugar and cinnamon on you.”
A delicate flush covered Cody’s features underneath the semi-darkness of the room, lit only by a bracketed torch on the wall, throwing him into a half-formed and mysterious relief, “I can think of a way you can taste it better,” Cody whispered, drawing himself up to his knees before Ted, their eyes meeting with the change of position. For once, like this, Cody was briefly taller than the blonde man.
“And how would that be?”
Reaching, Cody delicately cupped Ted’s cheeks in his hands and then angled their heads together. Though less than perfectly fluid their kisses weren’t as awkward or tentative as their first, and Cody sighed into Ted’s mouth almost immediately as he felt a curious, eager tongue tracing the seam of his lips and pleading with him for entrance. Warm, large hands spanned the length of his back and Cody mewed softly into the kiss before arching his back, drawing Ted closer as he slid his arms around his neck instead. At some point during their kissing they ended up lying down on the bed together, Cody’s body settled over Ted’s this time and their mouths still fused together and refusing to part for anything more than fleeting breaths.
“I’ll probably need to go soon,” Ted whispered, ragged from the strength of effect their kisses had on him, and also because he really didn’t want to go.
“Soon,” Cody mumbled, dropping kisses to the hollow of Ted’s throat and apparently without any intention of stopping ‘soon’.
“Soon,” Ted echoed, allowing his weak will to be overridden to spend some more time with Cody, even if it meant that they weren’t going to get to spend as much time together as he would have liked.
In the back of his mind Ted was concerned that he maybe gave Cody off the wrong impression, that he wanted him only because of the things they could do together and the incredible, magic way they made one another feel, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. The way Ted felt for Cody terrified him, even more than considering the prospect that he might never see his homeland or his family again, or, when he might have died from the arrow-wound in his gut. Still, it was terrifying but in the same measure it was exciting and he wanted to grasp the sensations with both hands and never let them go… even though he knew eventually that that was going to be the case.
Ted pulled from his thoughts only when he realised Cody was moving, the slightly younger man descending down his body instead, pausing when he was knelt between Ted’s thighs, partially exposed from where his toga had ridden up.
“Cody?” his voice was low, curious, undoubtedly excited with anticipation of what might be coming next, “You don’t need to-“if he didn’t want to do anything like that then Cody wasn’t going to be forced, not by Ted, nor anyone else, ever, if Ted had his way.
For a moment Cody pouted and Ted couldn’t help but smile, but the smile soon died into a gasp of surprise when Cody’s hand slipped underneath his toga, long, deceptively soft fingers cupping him through the thin film of his undergarments, “I want to. Are you saying you don’t want me to?” his hand, coy and yet eager, started to gently rub up and down, causing Ted’s thighs to clench and shift higher, angling his hips without credible knowledge of intending to do so.
“N-No, I never said that-”
“Good… now let me see if other things in this kingdom are as sweet as the pastries.”
Ordinarily Cody might have scoffed at the cheesiness of his own line (that was usually Mike’s department) but when Ted’s head rolled back and he let out one of the most arousing sounds Cody had ever heard from the first brush of his lips even through his undergarments Cody forgot all about talking and set about doing.
~::~
Cody tugged off Ted’s undergarments in a hurry, suddenly very anxious to get to what was beneath - it might have been a learning experience for both of them but he was pretty damned sure what he was doing in this case and he knew exactly what he wanted to do. Ted seemed both slightly nervous and very excited, even if his face hadn’t given it away, the sight of his cock springing free already rock-hard would have told Cody the truth.
“If he is found to have been killed by you, then it will go hard for Theodore and Cody both. Cody may be expelled from the kingdom with his entourage but there would be pressure for you to remain and face your crime. And there would be talk that Theodore brought you here in order to eliminate the threat. It would cause a rift between the brothers and great suspicion would fall upon him. No matter what, you cannot merely assassinate him.” She smirked. “Otherwise, I would have done so myself.”
~::~
When the door closed after the future queen and her husband’s most loyal warrior Evan turned towards Randy; their playfulness from earlier had been well and truly extinguished, and he was so dazed by her parting words that he had even forgotten about his state of almost-undress in the young woman’s presence. His eyes moved from the door to Randy and then back again before he then looking down, hands covering his face momentarily. A deep sigh left the smaller man’s lips before he lowered his hands and met Randy’s eyes entirely this time.
“She didn’t really mean that, did she?”
This time Randy was the one to look to the door, a small frown marring his features and causing furrows in his forehead that Evan had the almost inexplicable urge to soothe away with his fingers before Randy spoke again.
“I have no idea.”
“Oh come on,” Evan laughed slightly but the sound was somewhat uneasy, as though he wasn’t too sure of his own words even as he was going to voice them. Randy made a mental note to try and teach Evan to be a little more oblique in himself for sometimes he was too transparent and transparency could cost him dearly. Maybe he was just a pit perturbed with the change in circumstances but Randy was a bit concerned about someone attempting to take advantage of Evan’s occasional naiveté in his absence. “She can’t-I mean, I know she all but admitted that she isn’t the most typical of court ladies but an assassination? I don’t think she’s capable of something like that.”
A surprisingly sage look crossed Randy’s face, “You’d be surprised of what women can do, Evan, when the occasion calls for it,” after all he had seen the women in tribes such as places like Brittania whom had fought more fiercely and more daringly than any man whilst attempting to protect their homes and their families. Never before had Randy seen women of such ferocity and despite the fact that he was always certain that they were acting for their country and for the people they were attempting to civilise, but that was the first time he had felt a pang of regret for lives lost.
For a fraction of a second Evan looked perplexed (he couldn’t really tell Randy he was talking rubbish after all even if he’d never experienced such things for himself) before then biting on his thumbnail; the action made him look vulnerable and Randy had to actively fight the urge to move the small distance between them and embrace him, pledge to protect him from anything and everything that might seek to cause him harm for the rest of their lives.
“But if she was like that then how could she possibly…?” he didn’t finish the question, but at the same time Randy didn’t need him to; he thought he had a good idea of where the other’s thoughts had been leading.
“Well,” Randy paced back and forth a few steps in their room, vaguely aware that when Evan took a seat on one of the beds it was the bed that, as far as anyone else knew, was his, and he couldn’t stop the small thrill of awareness that ran down his spine and coiled in the pit of his stomach even despite the rather serious nature of the conversation they had just had, and were continuing then, “She did say that they were a love match, and Kaitlin appears to have some breeding… maybe she is a member of court, if not necessarily a high one,” that would explain how she and Brett had come to interact and why their marriage would be allowed… though chances were leniency would be granted since he hadn’t been considered (at all) to become king. Whatever the situation this was how things stood.
“… I still think she must have been joking.”
“Think what you will,” Randy murmured softly, eyes hooding as he stalked across the room to where Evan sat, managing to get right before the younger man before he seemed to register that Randy was moving, “Right now though I think I’d rather be thinking about and doing something else.”
Evan’s eyes widened a fraction and then he smiled coyly but with a glimmer of mischief in his eyes, “Oh really? And what would that be?”
“Mhm…” Randy reached out, letting a hand cup Evan’s cheek before his hand slid down to cup the younger man’s neck, revelling the shiver he felt pass through him as he rubbed his thumb over the hollow of the other’s throat, “Why don’t you take that toga off and I can show you?”
Most people usually cowed away from him at this stage, took a subservient approach and just let him lead how he wanted, but Evan met his eyes head on. He had always expected he would when he had dreamed about him in such moments, but seeing it in person made his heart beat just that little bit quicker. “Why don’t you take it off, and then show me?”
A low growl erupted from Randy’s throat and he found all thoughts of Cody and Ted and conspiracies theories in Brett’s court flew out of his mind as quickly as Evan’s toga flew off his body, followed by his undergarments. He was glorious in his naked state, bronzed and a lot more muscular than his smaller, svelte stature might sometimes have people thinking. Faded scars littered his body here and they but they didn’t detract from his beauty; if anything they enhanced it, proved what a strong, resilient creature Evan was to have been through such things and survived them to come out and keep going. Someone with his backstory could have given in years ago, perhaps even fallen into despair so deep that they might commit the ultimate sin of taking their own life, but not Evan. Evan, even if he had despaired, had never given in.
Underneath the intense scrutiny of his military superior’s eyes, Evan found himself as shy as he had been back in the bath-house when Randy had been little more than a stranger to him, “Stop staring at me.”
“Are you ordering me, Evan?” Randy sounded insultingly amused and Evan’s arm dropped from where it had covered his eyes as he flopped back onto the bed to prevent him from looking at the other man.
“So what if I-ah, Circe!” Evan shuddered and gasped as Randy’s tongue flicked over the head of his half-hard cock, bringing the appendage to fully erect in what had to be record time, even for Randy. Evan’s mouth fell open soundlessly as another teasing lick glanced across the head of his shaft, mewing softly in protest when Randy then abandoned his aching need and instead traversed back up his body so that their lips could meet once more.
Tomorrow he would deal with what was potentially going to happen, try to do some kind of controlling measures for the situation, but right then he was all Evan’s, and Evan was all his.
“I want to take you,” he breathed the words, heavy and wet, against Evan’s kiss-swollen lips when they finally parted for breath and Evan shivered slightly before rolling his head back to meet the other’s eyes.
“I want you to have me,” he found himself answering-a response that would have likely had him disgusted with himself at one stage.
They fell together in a tangle of limbs, kisses, caresses and hastily smothered groans from that moment on; their bodies joined in the oldest dance known to man, a gift from the gods, savouring and tasting, pushing and pulling, testing boundaries that neither man had altogether been aware he’d had before. The sun had long-since risen into dawn by the time their bodies finally quietened, and Randy pulled Evan close underneath the sheets as they settled for some sleep before the day began, sweat and other… mess, drying on their skin and creating the necessity for some kind of bath when they awoke later on.
Cody didn’t like to consider himself as especially vindictive, but if a wagging tongue ruined his time with Ted then he wouldn’t hesitate to exact a swift and horrible revenge upon the perpetrator.
“You did look as though you were enjoying yourself,” Ted mused as he approached, sitting on the end of the bed near Cody’s head where Cody was laid out.
Playfully narrowing his eyes Cody inquired, “Are you calling me fat?”
Ted snorted, “You could never be fat.”
For a brief moment Cody looked uneasy, “Yeah, well, tell that to Dustin.” Zeus only knew he loved his father and brother to death, but following in their footsteps genetically was something Cody was determined not to do… and yet he knew the amount of food he had packed away that night (albeit in the name of celebration) was probably going to come back to haunt him later.
Ted looked confused, “Your brother isn’t that large.”
“Neither was my father, if you’d believe it,” his mother had insisted that when he was a young man, although he’d always been stocky, his father hadn’t been even remotely close the rotundness he had when Ted had seen him.
Shaking his head Ted chided, “Stop worrying,” and then reached out and swiped his thumb over Cody’s plump bottom lip. His eyes hooded somewhat with mounting excitement as Cody’s lips automatically opened to his touch, his tongue flicking out as though to chase the thumb and draw it back to his mouth. And oh, wouldn’t Ted love to experience that mouth and have it paying its utmost attention to him the way it had the dessert earlier? Holding Cody’s eyes he reached up and flicked his tongue over the pad of his thumb that had been into contact with Cody’s lips and murmured, “I can still taste sugar and cinnamon on you.”
A delicate flush covered Cody’s features underneath the semi-darkness of the room, lit only by a bracketed torch on the wall, throwing him into a half-formed and mysterious relief, “I can think of a way you can taste it better,” Cody whispered, drawing himself up to his knees before Ted, their eyes meeting with the change of position. For once, like this, Cody was briefly taller than the blonde man.
“And how would that be?”
Reaching, Cody delicately cupped Ted’s cheeks in his hands and then angled their heads together. Though less than perfectly fluid their kisses weren’t as awkward or tentative as their first, and Cody sighed into Ted’s mouth almost immediately as he felt a curious, eager tongue tracing the seam of his lips and pleading with him for entrance. Warm, large hands spanned the length of his back and Cody mewed softly into the kiss before arching his back, drawing Ted closer as he slid his arms around his neck instead. At some point during their kissing they ended up lying down on the bed together, Cody’s body settled over Ted’s this time and their mouths still fused together and refusing to part for anything more than fleeting breaths.
“I’ll probably need to go soon,” Ted whispered, ragged from the strength of effect their kisses had on him, and also because he really didn’t want to go.
“Soon,” Cody mumbled, dropping kisses to the hollow of Ted’s throat and apparently without any intention of stopping ‘soon’.
“Soon,” Ted echoed, allowing his weak will to be overridden to spend some more time with Cody, even if it meant that they weren’t going to get to spend as much time together as he would have liked.
In the back of his mind Ted was concerned that he maybe gave Cody off the wrong impression, that he wanted him only because of the things they could do together and the incredible, magic way they made one another feel, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. The way Ted felt for Cody terrified him, even more than considering the prospect that he might never see his homeland or his family again, or, when he might have died from the arrow-wound in his gut. Still, it was terrifying but in the same measure it was exciting and he wanted to grasp the sensations with both hands and never let them go… even though he knew eventually that that was going to be the case.
Ted pulled from his thoughts only when he realised Cody was moving, the slightly younger man descending down his body instead, pausing when he was knelt between Ted’s thighs, partially exposed from where his toga had ridden up.
“Cody?” his voice was low, curious, undoubtedly excited with anticipation of what might be coming next, “You don’t need to-“if he didn’t want to do anything like that then Cody wasn’t going to be forced, not by Ted, nor anyone else, ever, if Ted had his way.
For a moment Cody pouted and Ted couldn’t help but smile, but the smile soon died into a gasp of surprise when Cody’s hand slipped underneath his toga, long, deceptively soft fingers cupping him through the thin film of his undergarments, “I want to. Are you saying you don’t want me to?” his hand, coy and yet eager, started to gently rub up and down, causing Ted’s thighs to clench and shift higher, angling his hips without credible knowledge of intending to do so.
“N-No, I never said that-”
“Good… now let me see if other things in this kingdom are as sweet as the pastries.”
Ordinarily Cody might have scoffed at the cheesiness of his own line (that was usually Mike’s department) but when Ted’s head rolled back and he let out one of the most arousing sounds Cody had ever heard from the first brush of his lips even through his undergarments Cody forgot all about talking and set about doing.
~::~
Cody tugged off Ted’s undergarments in a hurry, suddenly very anxious to get to what was beneath - it might have been a learning experience for both of them but he was pretty damned sure what he was doing in this case and he knew exactly what he wanted to do. Ted seemed both slightly nervous and very excited, even if his face hadn’t given it away, the sight of his cock springing free already rock-hard would have told Cody the truth.
“If he is found to have been killed by you, then it will go hard for Theodore and Cody both. Cody may be expelled from the kingdom with his entourage but there would be pressure for you to remain and face your crime. And there would be talk that Theodore brought you here in order to eliminate the threat. It would cause a rift between the brothers and great suspicion would fall upon him. No matter what, you cannot merely assassinate him.” She smirked. “Otherwise, I would have done so myself.”
~::~
When the door closed after the future queen and her husband’s most loyal warrior Evan turned towards Randy; their playfulness from earlier had been well and truly extinguished, and he was so dazed by her parting words that he had even forgotten about his state of almost-undress in the young woman’s presence. His eyes moved from the door to Randy and then back again before he then looking down, hands covering his face momentarily. A deep sigh left the smaller man’s lips before he lowered his hands and met Randy’s eyes entirely this time.
“She didn’t really mean that, did she?”
This time Randy was the one to look to the door, a small frown marring his features and causing furrows in his forehead that Evan had the almost inexplicable urge to soothe away with his fingers before Randy spoke again.
“I have no idea.”
“Oh come on,” Evan laughed slightly but the sound was somewhat uneasy, as though he wasn’t too sure of his own words even as he was going to voice them. Randy made a mental note to try and teach Evan to be a little more oblique in himself for sometimes he was too transparent and transparency could cost him dearly. Maybe he was just a pit perturbed with the change in circumstances but Randy was a bit concerned about someone attempting to take advantage of Evan’s occasional naiveté in his absence. “She can’t-I mean, I know she all but admitted that she isn’t the most typical of court ladies but an assassination? I don’t think she’s capable of something like that.”
A surprisingly sage look crossed Randy’s face, “You’d be surprised of what women can do, Evan, when the occasion calls for it,” after all he had seen the women in tribes such as places like Brittania whom had fought more fiercely and more daringly than any man whilst attempting to protect their homes and their families. Never before had Randy seen women of such ferocity and despite the fact that he was always certain that they were acting for their country and for the people they were attempting to civilise, but that was the first time he had felt a pang of regret for lives lost.
For a fraction of a second Evan looked perplexed (he couldn’t really tell Randy he was talking rubbish after all even if he’d never experienced such things for himself) before then biting on his thumbnail; the action made him look vulnerable and Randy had to actively fight the urge to move the small distance between them and embrace him, pledge to protect him from anything and everything that might seek to cause him harm for the rest of their lives.
“But if she was like that then how could she possibly…?” he didn’t finish the question, but at the same time Randy didn’t need him to; he thought he had a good idea of where the other’s thoughts had been leading.
“Well,” Randy paced back and forth a few steps in their room, vaguely aware that when Evan took a seat on one of the beds it was the bed that, as far as anyone else knew, was his, and he couldn’t stop the small thrill of awareness that ran down his spine and coiled in the pit of his stomach even despite the rather serious nature of the conversation they had just had, and were continuing then, “She did say that they were a love match, and Kaitlin appears to have some breeding… maybe she is a member of court, if not necessarily a high one,” that would explain how she and Brett had come to interact and why their marriage would be allowed… though chances were leniency would be granted since he hadn’t been considered (at all) to become king. Whatever the situation this was how things stood.
“… I still think she must have been joking.”
“Think what you will,” Randy murmured softly, eyes hooding as he stalked across the room to where Evan sat, managing to get right before the younger man before he seemed to register that Randy was moving, “Right now though I think I’d rather be thinking about and doing something else.”
Evan’s eyes widened a fraction and then he smiled coyly but with a glimmer of mischief in his eyes, “Oh really? And what would that be?”
“Mhm…” Randy reached out, letting a hand cup Evan’s cheek before his hand slid down to cup the younger man’s neck, revelling the shiver he felt pass through him as he rubbed his thumb over the hollow of the other’s throat, “Why don’t you take that toga off and I can show you?”
Most people usually cowed away from him at this stage, took a subservient approach and just let him lead how he wanted, but Evan met his eyes head on. He had always expected he would when he had dreamed about him in such moments, but seeing it in person made his heart beat just that little bit quicker. “Why don’t you take it off, and then show me?”
A low growl erupted from Randy’s throat and he found all thoughts of Cody and Ted and conspiracies theories in Brett’s court flew out of his mind as quickly as Evan’s toga flew off his body, followed by his undergarments. He was glorious in his naked state, bronzed and a lot more muscular than his smaller, svelte stature might sometimes have people thinking. Faded scars littered his body here and they but they didn’t detract from his beauty; if anything they enhanced it, proved what a strong, resilient creature Evan was to have been through such things and survived them to come out and keep going. Someone with his backstory could have given in years ago, perhaps even fallen into despair so deep that they might commit the ultimate sin of taking their own life, but not Evan. Evan, even if he had despaired, had never given in.
Underneath the intense scrutiny of his military superior’s eyes, Evan found himself as shy as he had been back in the bath-house when Randy had been little more than a stranger to him, “Stop staring at me.”
“Are you ordering me, Evan?” Randy sounded insultingly amused and Evan’s arm dropped from where it had covered his eyes as he flopped back onto the bed to prevent him from looking at the other man.
“So what if I-ah, Circe!” Evan shuddered and gasped as Randy’s tongue flicked over the head of his half-hard cock, bringing the appendage to fully erect in what had to be record time, even for Randy. Evan’s mouth fell open soundlessly as another teasing lick glanced across the head of his shaft, mewing softly in protest when Randy then abandoned his aching need and instead traversed back up his body so that their lips could meet once more.
Tomorrow he would deal with what was potentially going to happen, try to do some kind of controlling measures for the situation, but right then he was all Evan’s, and Evan was all his.
“I want to take you,” he breathed the words, heavy and wet, against Evan’s kiss-swollen lips when they finally parted for breath and Evan shivered slightly before rolling his head back to meet the other’s eyes.
“I want you to have me,” he found himself answering-a response that would have likely had him disgusted with himself at one stage.
They fell together in a tangle of limbs, kisses, caresses and hastily smothered groans from that moment on; their bodies joined in the oldest dance known to man, a gift from the gods, savouring and tasting, pushing and pulling, testing boundaries that neither man had altogether been aware he’d had before. The sun had long-since risen into dawn by the time their bodies finally quietened, and Randy pulled Evan close underneath the sheets as they settled for some sleep before the day began, sweat and other… mess, drying on their skin and creating the necessity for some kind of bath when they awoke later on.